Kitty Grady

From Innocence to Experience: Becoming Worldly in Joanna Hogg’s ‘The Souvenir: Part II’ (2021)

Three close-ups of white flowers, played against the sound of birdsong and buzzing bees, form the opening shots of The Souvenir Part II (2021). Saturated with sunlight and jostling in the wind, they speak simultaneously of purity and innocence, mourning and afterlife. Their grainy, Super-8 texture is an instant reminder of the medium of film and its ability to capture the beautiful, the ineffable and the fleeting. 
    The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s sequel to The Souvenir (2019), a film depicting the amorous relationship between film student Julie Hart (Honor Swinton Byrne) and Anthony (Tom Burke), a dandyish older man who works in the Foreign Office. The first film depicts the couple’s liaison in all its heady, spellbinding sumptuousness, the smoke and mirrors of falling in love, before its dramatic descent into pain and tragedy due to Anthony’s heroin addiction, initially his deceit around this dependency followed by his overdose and death. The Souvenir Part II picks up where Part I left off, tracking Julie’s life post-relationship, her movement from innocence to experience as both a director and a human being, alongside her attempts to understand her time with Anthony and make a ‘souvenir’ of the first via her student film project. The autofictional intrigue is based on Hogg’s own experience as a young woman in the 1980s, when she herself was a film student at NFTS. Via the metafilmic, Hogg creates a crystalline, labyrinth structure for the film which acts as a meditative space for her to reflect on her own craft and development as a director.
    The principal colour of The Souvenir (Part I) is pink: Julie’s dressing gown and the bedspread which adorns her princess gold bed. Pink alludes to the dress of the woman in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘The Souvenir’ (1778) which Anthony takes Julie to see in The Wallace Collection and gives the film its name, a painting which depicts the unbearable sweetness of love’s first flush (‘She has just received word from her lover and she is carving his name in a tree,’ Anthony explains). In Part II, the film’s colourscape shifts to red. After the opening images of white flowers, Julie (herself ‘deflowered’) announces to her mother, Rosalind (Tilda Swinton) ‘my period is late’. The world outside the containment and safety of a relationship is depicted as lonely and threatening. Alone in her flat, Julie receives an unannounced visit from an actor, Jim (Charlie Heaton) who is working on the same film set as her. As he lingers outside, Julie looks at him through the keyhole as the fisheye lens distorts his image ominously. Julie tentatively lets him in and they kiss on the threshold, before he pushes her against the door. She tells him she is on her period (crisis averted) and they have sex anyway, roughly and quickly compared to the more tender sex scenes with Anthony in the previous film– the diagonal framing of her face as she orgasms (a jouissant mixture of ecstasy and agony) directly matches a shot in the first film, except there it was brightly sunlit and here she is cloaked in darkness. The scene crescendos towards the monstrous when Jim then kisses Julie with his bloody mouth, marking her red too. When he leaves she locks the door concertedly and returns to the bedroom, examining the red stain of blood on the white sheets.
    Yet red is also the colour of incipient creativity. In the next scene, the red of the blood is swapped for the shiny red of a car in close-up. The camera zooms out and a woman in a crimson suit retouches her lipstick, which is also bright red. The lights darken and the actor gets out – the camera focusing fetishistically on her foot – and points a gun. We are on a film set, and from the side-lines Julie takes photographs of the scene and activity on set, as her classmate Garance (Ariane Labed) directs the action. In a flourishing of crimson chromatics, we watch the incubation of Julie’s creative ideas out of heartbreak: a montage of emotional convalescence shows Julie writing in her vermilion notebook at the restaurant she once frequented with Anthony, before sitting forlornly at home and lying in bed, the gap left by her former lover framed clearly. In images of wellness and recuperation we then see her at home, gardening with her mother, before finally an image of a single fat raspberry, ready to eat. The script Julie presents to her tutors in the following scene is bound with a shiny red bow.


    Photograph courtesy of A24.

    The script is received coldly by her male tutors for its lack of ‘precision’ and amateur appearance – a judgement that misogynistically implies Julie’s gender and the coded effeminacy of her producer Marland (Jaygann Ayeh). They also scoff at its lack of title (which would be The Souvenir) and are further bemused by its subtitle, ‘art as life’. By contrast,  we began Part I with Julie planning to make a film about a working-class boy called Tony from Sunderland – a character she spoke about in unreasoned, paternalistic terms: ‘he is obsessed with his mother’. She defends the new script by parroting Anthony’s words, ‘I don’t want to film life as it plays out, in real time, I want to film life as I see it.’ Part II shows Julie’s directorial vision as somewhat formless, but finding its form, as well as her formation as a director. Before the shooting starts, we watch Julie walk around the different rooms of the film set. Her figure appears at first only fleetingly as she paces quickly, her footsteps echoing in the cavernous space and her shadows projecting large on the wall. We overhear voices – of Anthony and Julie from the first film – memories conjured, punctum-like, as she walks around the set. Yet as we watch Julie become part of the space, it suggests transformation of these painful traces in a kind of becoming-director. In the scene’s final shot we see Julie through a glass window pane, her body fragmented by shadows and light, before she moves out of frame and we see her reflected in a mirror, in virtual form only. After hearing the haunting voices again, she leaves. Through a gap in the film set wall we watch her walk, far back into the space, the layers and depth suggesting her complete immersion into the filmic surroundings until she becomes almost indistinguishable from it. In the next shot a figure in a matching position in the frame enters the film set walking towards us. It is Anthony-as-actor; life become art.
    Julie brings her personal belongings onto the film set – from her gold bed to her clothes: red slippers (a reference to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), another film about a young woman finding her creative ‘feet’), and dresses Anthony in the 1980s Vivienne Westwood ‘Pirate’ collection that costumed the first film, She casts Garance, not an actor but a director (and played by the director Ariane Labed) in the lead role, a decision that reflects Hogg’s own casting – she reportedly looked around film schools to find Julie, before settling on Swinton Byrne, another non-actor (and as her goddaughter a clear avatar for Hogg). True to her word, we watch Julie fumblingly attempt to recreate life literally as she sees it. About to start directing a scene where Anthony is shooting up in the bathroom, to the frustration of the crew, Julie makes a last minute decision to change the position of the camera: ‘I don’t want the camera to see more than she does… I don’t want to see exactly what’s going on inside this bathroom, because she doesn’t.’ In an interview Hogg explained that she asked Swinton Byrne to direct these scenes, adding a documentary level to the sequence, and blurring the lines between the real and the unreal. When they reshoot from the new angle, we watch Julie watching the action through the monitor, and then after she cuts, we see her in the monitor giving further direction to the actors, her status as a performer or ‘director’ confounded further. After struggling to explain the intricacies of her relationship to the actors, Julie’s culminating naivety comes when she starts trying to direct a scene with Julie and Anthony that is meant to be in the evening even though it is set up as daytime, to the great irritation of the gaffer. Although a bewilderingly obvious mistake, Julie’s confusion of ‘day for night,’ is testament to her faith in cinema as a transformative medium, its capacity to depict life ‘as she sees it,’ rather than as it plays out in real time.


    Photograph courtesy of A24.

    In relation to Anthony however, we also watch Julie’s attempts to see things as they are. In Part 1, he frequently appeared as a silhouette, his back turned to us, a formality which reflected her epistemological deficit around his life and her ignorance of his addiction. In The Melancholia of Class (2021), the writer Cynthia Cruz analyses Julie’s lack of knowledge about the real Anthony as a symptom of her class privilege. Julie refuses to see what is in front of her because it is other to her. Her fetishization of working classness in her initial film project (the boy called Tony who loves his mother, an idealised version of the real Anthony) works as a form of denial. Whilst Cruz’s characterisation of Anthony as working class is tenuous (his parents are also coded middle class), her analysis of Julie’s wilful blindness to Anthony’s abjection is astute. In Part II, Julie becomes a detective figure, speaking to his friends and enablers, her tape recorder in hand. Yet her attempts to know the true Anthony are ultimately unsatisfied, repeatedly thwarted by her interviewees, who do little to elaborate on Anthony’s true nature, or whose descriptions only add to his murkiness. Anthony’s father, who identified his body after the overdose, says only that he ‘found it very hard to accept that it was him,’ and sends Julie away with a framed illustration of his son as a little boy, an idealised cliché. Julie visits Anthony’s former therapist: ‘He was quite dark,’ she says, and for confidentiality reasons can only conjecture to his psychological state: ‘He wanted to stop what was going on in his life, the deceit it had become,’ rather than unveil his deceit. In her appraisal, deceit becomes Anthony’s essence, his death-driving force. Julie’s inability to understand Anthony comes to the fore in her directing scenes. The actors playing Julie and Anthony repeatedly struggle to understand her explanations due to her skewed, undeveloped understanding of Anthony. ‘It was just like that,’ Julie explains when she describes how they never discussed his addiction.
    Julie must then accept Anthony’s murky unknowability, but what she can shed light on are her own psychological workings. Later on in the film, the therapist becomes Julie’s own: ‘I don’t know if I’m missing Anthony as a whole as he was, the individual [...] or if I miss having a companion and that intimacy, that mysterious leader who encouraged me to take risks,’ she explains. In Love/Desire(2012), Lauren Berlant defines desire as the ‘cloud of possibility generated by the gap between an object’s specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it’. Julie misses the nondescript ‘that’ of the relationship, the way it buoyed her up and made her feel good and attended to. There is a maturity to her realisation of desire’s inherent immaturity and egoism, and with it comes the realisation that she can and will love again: ‘I want that intimacy with someone else, someone to wake up in bed with in the morning’ she says. ‘You are the one that can make it happen,’ explains the therapist. Julie’s task is only to keep on going: ‘You are a human being with life to live, that is your job.’
    ‘Anthony was a junkie, onwards,’ says Patrick, Anthony’s friend (also a director), to Julie. Although characterised as a chain-smoking parody of Eighties brashness, played for laughs by Richard Ayoyade, his words hold some sincere wisdom – accepting and holding Anthony as he was, but imploring Julie to move on, not to dwell too melancholically on the past, or persist in finding answers for what will always be undiscoverable, the questions that will always remain. His early directive to Julie, to ‘make a memorial for him,’ realised in her student film, indeed provides our protagonist with the greatest sense of release and rebirth. Arriving towards the end of the main film, her student film’s première has the wish-fulfilling quality of a dream sequence. The cinema, seemingly booked out for Julie alone, like the ending of Federico Fellini’s 8½ (another film about the making of a film) is filled with a chorus of her friends and family, who listen as her tutor now humbly concedes to the audience: ‘there was a time when we didn’t think we would see you here graduating today, Julie.’ ‘It’s my gift to someone I knew and loved very much,’ Julie announces, dressed in trophy gold. The lights dim and on the screen two red curtains pull open. The titles appear:The Souvenir.
    In On Longing (1984), Susan Stewart writes that the souvenir object is defined by lack, ‘metonymic to an increasingly abstract, and hence “lost,” set of referents: the gown, the dance, the particular occasion, the particular spring.’ The mass-produced postcard, reducing the size of the original painting – once visited in person – replaces aura and texture with flat, glossy surface. By way of the souvenir, the lived experience is literally reduced, miniaturised and commercialised. Stewart argues that to transform the souvenir, to recover its personal significance, it must be supplemented by narrative and anecdote. Film, with its capacity for fantasy, movement and shape-shifting, allows for its own form of supplementation. As the film starts we see the projector’s beams in the cinema theatre, immaterial and elusive but nonetheless illuminating form out of darkness. We see Julie holding the Fragonard postcard in her gold bed – a lone piece of furniture in an otherwise black mise-en-scène. Hearing Anthony’s now familiar, painful words in voiceover (‘She’s just received word from her lover…’) Julie then sees the postcard projected, larger than life, onto the wall: a diaphanous, luminous layer. Wearing her red slippers, her feet magically lift off the ground (a motif and primitive special effect that again recalls Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, as well as the childish fantasy of The Wizard of Oz[2]). As she levitates with her arms outstretched, she reaches towards the projection, before disappearing into it, herself transformed, immaterialised by the filmic medium.


    Photograph courtesy of A24.

    The diminutive, physical memento is converted through  movement, light and surface, a possibility singularly offered by cinema. Yet in turn Julie’s student film, nested within our main film, provides a kind of condensed, plastic form for Julie’s intangible souvenirs and experiences, her memories of Anthony and the trauma of losing him. The movie – 15 minutes long – speeds through a sequence of different cinematic aesthetics and genres to tell the story, overlaid with voice overs of earlier dialogue (so bringing the earlier preparatory scene to creative life). First, kitschy and neo-classical, Julie, wearing a white Grecian-style dress, uncovers Anthony’s body, Magritte-like under a shroud. Then, 1950s neo-noir in black and white as she pursues Anthony through the streets – they enter a replica of Julie’s apartment building a miniaturised door, squeezing through like Alice in Wonderland. Then it’s a 1940s Musical as Julie watches, anguished, as Anthony dances with a woman in red. Horror as she wanders, lost through the woods, hearing his withdrawal screams and then like a puppet theatre as they ride in a gondola in Venice, moving along like marionettes.
    As well as transforming size, the miniature, argues Stewart, entails a transformation of real, historical time into a compressed time that transcends the duration of the everyday (‘life as it plays out’ in the words of our protagonist). In creating a miniaturised, plastic, sped up version of events, with clearly defined, apprehensible contours, Julie creates a space that she can break out from. In the miniature film’s final sequence Julie, dressed in an olive-green gown, paces around a hall of mirrors, wearing a grotesque, toy-like mask made to resemble Anthony. She passes the mask to her mother, and then, after passing the other significant characters from the film in succession (both a greeting and goodbye), the film ‘rewinds’ back to the beginning and Julie walks back through all its scenes – time is not only compressed but reversed. ‘And I am born again,’ we hear her say in voiceover, once and then again. As she returns to the ‘beginning’ of the film, she is dressed in white again. She has reached the film’s boundary, both physical and temporal. As her Super-8 camera shoots up into her hand she tears through the wall, through the memory (we read clearly the name of the painting). To the soundtrack of The Eurythmics ‘There Must Be an Angel,’ Julie, herself celestial, runs through a field, euphoric and smiling, fast and powerful. The camera tracks her feet, barely able to capture their accelerated motion as she moves onwards into the future, this afterlife.
    In breaking out of her own film, Julie also moves from the space of self-absorption to the space of the social. Indeed, Julie’s greatest transformation from Part I to Part II are her maturing relations towards others, her movement from a subject at the centre of her own world, to a subject that is worldly. Much like the protagonist of Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 in the first half, Hogg shows life revolving around Julie. In the initial scenes at home her mother hovers outside her door for several moments before coming in, like an actor in the wings. Other characters – her producer, for example – seem one-dimensional in the way the conversation focuses so unnaturally on Julie: ‘You don’t have enough faith in yourself…’/‘You always say this about me,’ she responds. Julie goes for a drink with a film technician (Joe Alwyne) in which the conversation is focused on her grief for Anthony, her relationship with his parents specifically. When she asks him to go back to hers for a drink, he reveals that he must cook for his boyfriend who is unwell and has been for some time (a sombre nod to the emergent AIDS epidemic). Julie must realise, with some embarrassment, that not everyone is desirous of her, and her own suffering, whilst significant and unique, does not exist in a vacuum.
    Rosalind’s is characterised by  a fussy but capacious maternity, an inexhaustible resource that Julie draws from: ‘I hope you are going to stay for a very long time, as long as possible my darling’/ ‘stay another night,’ she asks her daughter when she comes to visit. (Julie leaves, but asks her mother for money on the way out.) Rosalind has recently enrolled in a pottery class, a pursuit of her own creativity: ‘I’m loving it,’ she announces sweetly. She has made a little sugar pot, ‘an Etruscan vase,’ without handles which she is proud to show her daughter, who initially ignores it. In a later scene she accidentally breaks the ceramic, spilling sugar everywhere. Rosalind’s attempt to create, even primitive, symbolic form for herself, rather than remain as formless sustenance (such as sugar) is  shattered carelessly by her daughter. In one of the film’s final scenes, Julie – her hair now longer – writes Rosalind a cheque. Sat on the sofa together, the vertical partnership of mother and child turns into that of horizontal equals. Julie nags Rosalind for lighting a cigarette and, asking if her father knows she has been smoking, Swinton says that ‘like a truly loving person’ he pretends not to, recalling Julie’s own semi-wilful ignorance of Anthony’s heroin addiction.
    The Souvenir Part IIcharts Julie’s arrival at maturity and worldliness, but a maturity that is crucially recognizant of its ignorance – more a departure than an arrival, buoyed up with a knowledge that there is a future, an onwards-time, still to come, even if it cannot be reached just yet. In the final scenes, Julie is on set again, directing a music video. In another semi-flight of fancy, a daydream-esque scene, we see Julie being interviewed as a talking head about her work. She admits that she has not quite yet found her voice, but that it will come: ‘I hope I have something to say in my 30s, by the time I get there’. She agrees with the interviewer’s assertion that she is like a hamster, ‘storing and gathering’ information: ‘I’m waiting to find out what I want to do with that.’


    Photograph courtesy of A24.

    In the next scene Julie is watching TV at home. We see footage of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Julie, in reverse shot, is shown crying, weeping heavily. Before this scene, we have  seen Julie vomiting at several points– after an argument with her film crew and after discovering her father’s illness. This psychosomatic reaction suggests Julie’s inability to accept or properly process what is going on in her life, regurgitating it instead. Here her tears suggest a processing of emotions that is cathartic and transformative, as well as oriented towards otherness.  A boy who was fourteen when the wall went up, now a man, is interviewed on television: ‘I was thinking the wall would never fall.’ ‘And what are you thinking now?’ asks the reporter: ‘The wall will fall,’ he responds. The Troubles, whose bombs and threats provided historical context to the The Souvenir (part I) remained in the background of Julie’s world, not something she confronted with any sense of real awareness (Anthony told Julie that it was for her that he worked hard at the Foreign Office: ‘to keep you safe’). Here, Julie’s crying – whilst clearly inflected by her own experience, the breakthrough of her own emotional wall– marks a coming-into-consciousness, a taking up of place in the realm of the political in which she confronts her context literally head on. The scene also marks Julie’s shift from a temporality that is individual to a temporality that is historical: the intimate time of the personally significant ‘souvenir’ swapped for the collective memory of a world-forming event.
    Rather than denoting finality, the so-called end of history is in fact the beginning of a new story, an uncertain future which cannot be known, but which requires the hard work of rebuilding to reach. The final scene, like the beginning of Part One, when she first meets Anthony, is a party at Julie’s flat – her 30th birthday. Before some shots of pink blossom in bloom, Julie welcomes guests, elegant in an asymmetrical black top with her hair slicked back, laughing with her friends – a young woman in the springtime of her life. ‘There will be another time,’ sing the lyrics on the soundtrack. We see Garance holding her pregnant belly, an image of fecundity and futurity. Julie takes a photograph of everyone at the party: a new souvenir. A friend asks her if she has a boyfriend and she says no, but that she’s happy on her own. In the next shot Julie eats a slice of birthday cake (now able to digest, store, gather) an energy that will fuel the future. The music has changed (‘Back to Life’ by Soul II Soul) yet still sings of futurity. As the dancing goes on the shot cuts and we are outside the film set, and now watch the scene through the flat’s window, which we realise is in fact a replica, situated in a studio on the ground floor (and the same studio Julie made her film in). As the music becomes muffled and echoing, the camera pans right to left until we reach the ‘actual’ film crew, working in darkness. The shot holds for several seconds before we hear Hogg’s voice announce, finally: ‘cut’. This moment of metatextual eruption reminds us that the film we have just watched is Hogg’s own miniature, her own way of compressing time, of giving shape and form to an experience and a period of life that has shaped her as a director, and probably as a person too. This is her attempt to capture that in film: however elusive, however painful, however exquisite.